By Amy S. Choi

Safeguarding your workplace is getting trickier. more employees are telecommuting, working off portable devices, trading thumb drives like candy. It can all put your business data at risk. Then there’s physical security—petty vandalism and the ever-looming possibility of merchandise walking off on its own. A few tactics can dramatically improve security, but even the most sophisticated technology is useless if managers don’t know what to do when they spy suspicious activity or an alarm is tripped. Says J. Michael Coleman, vice-president of commercial real estate at security firm AlliedBarton in Conshohocken, Pa.: “Security must be proactive and not reactive.” Here’s the gear to get you started.